She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad – she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes – the toad became beautiful.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
So here’s the thing about mud that nobody wants to admit because we’re all too busy pretending we’re evolved beings who’ve transcended our animal selves, mud is REAL in a way that almost nothing else is anymore, I mean really real, not Instagram-real or LinkedIn-real or whatever performative reality we’re all participating in like good little consumers of our own lives, but actual earth-and-water-combined-into-this-primordial-ooze-that-makes-you-remember-you’re-just-a-mammal REAL.
And Lindsey gets it, she GETS it in a way I’ve rarely seen anyone get anything, the way she just plunges into this muck like it’s not even a question, like the whole point of having a body is to drag it through difficult terrain and come out the other side covered in proof that you actually existed for those hours, that you weren’t just scrolling or thinking about scrolling or thinking about what you’d say about scrolling if someone asked you about it.
The mud clings to everything, your boots, your calves, your sense of who you thought you were before you started slogging through this beautiful horrible mess, and she’s laughing, actually LAUGHING, like she knows something the rest of us forgot sometime around third grade when we learned that being clean was somehow more important than being alive.